Posting recipes on a blog is something many of us do. This plugin called GetMeCooking makes it easy to manage and present your recipes in a nice and search engine friendly format, as well as automatically gives your recipe the chance to be listed on the getmecooking.com recipe directory too, linking back to your site in the process. If you’ve been thinking about storing and sharing your recipes on your WordPress blog, now would be a great time to start.

Install and Setup

Install direct from your WordPress dashboard by searching for “getmecooking” on the plugins page. You’ll also need to setup a free username on the GetMeCooking site. Once you’ve done that, head over to your user profile and edit the Blog Info settings.

Next, back to WordPress. On the new GetMeCooking sidebar block, edit General Settings to enter your username. You can also edit a variety of other layout options or change the CSS from here, but we’ll leave the rest as default for now.

On the post edit screen, you’ll see a new orange icon from which you can insert your recipe. However, a separate interface is used to create and manage your recipes, which are created as custom post types.

Creating a Recipe

Click Add New from the Recipes sidebar section – it’s annoying that there is a separate section for settings, but there you go. The recipe entry screen is basic but functional. Start off naming your recipe and adding ingredients – there’s a comprehensive list of measurements to choose from. Be sure to fill in all the tabs with accurate information, and if you want to upload individual step photos you’ll need to save the recipe first.

When you’re done, head back to the regular post edit screen and click the GetMeCooking button to choose your recipe.

Notice the useful print button, which will cut out all your extraneous template areas. Since the CSS is customizable, it’s easy to adjust things, but the default style worked well for me and looks seamless on the page.

Being Listed on the GetMeCooking.com

With the default settings, your recipes will be automatically submitted, but be warned that they still need manual approval of up to a week and must adhere to strict quality rules:

Full ingredients listing

Step by step instructions

Number of servings, cooking time and additional meta info should be added

Good quality photographs with optional step photos – at least 520px wide. Good enough so that others can compare their creations to yours.

Microformat Rich Snippets

The final point I wanted to show is that once you’ve embedded a recipe on your blog post, the post is correctly formatted for Google recipe index – though bear in mind that just because you have it set up correctly, there is no guarantee Google will use your metadata.

Comparison to Other Plugins

I previously suggested using the ReciPressStart A Recipe Blog With The Recipress Wordpress PluginStart A Recipe Blog With The Recipress Wordpress PluginRecipress is a free, professional quality plugin for adding beautifully styled recipes to your blog posts. Since I’ve been told my Jalapeño bread is to die for, I thought maybe it would be worth adding...Read More plugin, which has a slightly more attractive interface on the WordPress side, but offers none of the exposure benefits you get from having your recipe listed at in the GetMeCooking directory, so on that alone I believe this plugin is preferable. ReciPress claims to now support hRecipe microformat for RichSnippet meta data in Google Search, but I was unable to get the example page to validate; unlike GetMeCooking which does validate.

Questions or problems, ask away in the comments and I’ll do my best to help. Also, if you know any good bread (or wine) recipes or what you feel are the best WordPress plugins for cooking, then I’m always happy to hear about those! Happy cooking!

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James has a BSc in Artificial Intelligence, and is CompTIA A+ and Network+ certified. He's the lead developer of MakeUseOf, and spends his free time playing VR paintball and boardgames. He's been building PCs since he was a kid.